An international non-governmental organisation has called on the government to move with speed and save Kenyans working in Saudi Arabia from abuse.
In a report, Amnesty International noted that Kenyans working in the West Asian country are facing various forms of abuse, including forced labour, exploitation, and human trafficking.
The NGO lamented that Kenyans are lured to Saudi Arabia with promises of well-paying jobs, only for them to find themselves trapped and being abused by their employers.
"Women, full of hope to change their lives back at home, travel to Saudi Arabia with enthusiasm to work and send money back home, only for them to be slapped with extreme working conditions, severe mistreatment, and systemic failures that allow the abuse to persist," the NGO said in its report.
The report was published after Amnesty International interviewed 72 women who reported being physically assaulted by their employers or their employer’s children. The women, who spoke after returning to Kenya, said their employers and their families would spit on them and would also beat them up. The abuses sometimes escalated to sexual harassment and violence by male members of the families they worked for.
“We had no freedom. I never left the house, and never saw the outside world. My employer held my passport, and there was nothing I could do,” said one of the survivors.
Another one said, "There was a time my employer came and harassed me. He lifted my dress. I fought him and told him that I was not interested. I told him that I had only come to work. He tried to give me money, but I refused,” another narrated.
Owing to these findings, the organisation outlined a series of urgent reforms it said, need to be taken, including ratifying key international conventions, enforcing stricter labour protections, and establishing resources for Kenyan domestic workers facing exploitation.
Amnesty International has demanded that the government ensures bilateral labour agreement between the two countries is rights-based and sets out clear protection guarantees for domestic workers in line with international standards, including on recruitment and the employer-pays principle, working and living conditions, payment of wages, non-discrimination, dispute resolution, and access to justice.
With the increased cases of Kenyans being duped into foreign countries with promises of good jobs only to end up in modern slavery, Amnesty is calling on the Kenyan government to strengthen the regulation of recruitment agencies, something the immigration department has been working on.
Further, the government has been urged to ensure all migrant workers, regardless of their migration status, have access to a transparent and effective complaints mechanism through which they or their families can seek redress.
With nearly 200,000 Kenyans working in Saudi Arabia, the organization insists that failure to act will continue to leave vulnerable workers trapped in exploitation.
The demands by the international organization come barely a month after other Kenyans went through similar torture in Myanmar.
